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Published: September 30th 2011
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I looked at my jaw in the mirror today. Different. The familiar position of my habitual chin, retracted back, is no longer comfortable for me. Curious. I have been in jaw limbo since the day I was born. Forceps. Correctional Orthodontics. Then, a broken jaw, wired shut to reset. I never liked the position of my jaw in the pressed back place anyway, well, not how it felt behind my eyes my whole life or how it tipped my head forward a bit, making it hard to hold my balance. But today, I am not so sure I dig the face I appear with when my jaw is more presently placed. I look mad. I am mad.
I haven’t spoken much of the work outside of the Hakomi world in the last couple of months, but what a ton of my discovery has lead me into is the work to re-orient my physical body in space… (what makes somatic sense to my body consciousness). I have collected many impressions during self-study moments of intense head pressure. It feels something like barometric pressure, or heightened tension. What I am coming to understand is that this has a lot to do with
structural displacement. Pressure behind my eyes, lots of desire to have my head held and pressed and stroked. It feels as if other work is just at the edge of wanting to happen, but cannot move through my body form as it is placed now.
I had an idea that CranioSacral work would be of the nature my body would respond well to. In the last months, through 3 sessions of CranioSacral work I can begin to feel my inner space respond… what a relief. I hadn’t realized that the inside of my head felt like two opposite magnets put together so often...and I’ve been living with this for as long as I can remember. It’s always felt like a repulsion of interior forces, and I am finally feeling the possibility that one magnet may be able to be turned in the appropriate direction. Hello....connection, flow and function, hooray.
So, I wonder if this is what I am seeing in my jaw line, which has been guided forward, a bit….so now like the hinge in my face at the jaw is no longer agitating my skull, and the inner noise created is less oppressive. It is curious I
hadn’t noticed this hindrance before. It has taken many repeated moments of self-study. Now, each time I find myself, seeing myself with my head, laying limp to the right side…I recognize that was where I was laying when my jaw had just been broken by the steering wheel of my teenage car. I remembered the moment the left side of my face had given up and become deformed…. so much for the years of corrective orthodontics. And the uncomfortable thousands spent to reset the forcep mistake.
In the moment of the accident when I found my body unconscious in that side-lying position I think something else also happened, beyond the breaking jaw…. I’ve wondered about this for a while. I am pretty sure a part of me was lost. The teenage accident stole part of me away...it was my “go”… my risk taker, my driver, the one who was zooming the car without a seatbelt, singing into a ditch, the ostentasious one, the lost 16 year old.
I’ve spent most of my subsequent years searching, wondering where it was that I went off to. Where am I in space? Until this moment in my life, I had always
been more interested in the experience of the Near Death place.....where is it, what is it, how can I go there again…awake. The thought never crossed me to bring the part of me who experienced that state, who is still experiencing that state right now back, here. I’ve been living in limbo between two worlds for the last 14 years. Maybe clearing the noise from my skull also cleared the path to this knowing.
After the accident, I went back to high school and my part time job and back to driving, but my caution and perceptual sensitivity was extraordinary, at times anguishing. My jaw had been reset and wired shut in the same off kilter original birth injury style, and I spent a lot of quiet time reading. I found a book called Vurt, by Jeff Noon - a cyberpunk novel about alternate realities. In this book the main character was on a trip in an alternate reality with his sister, and somewhere in the realm, he lost her. In exchange, Vurt took her and gave him a potent visceral pure drug in the shape of a live alien. When he came back from his trip, he had
the useless potent alien and no sister. His sole motivation was to travel back into the Vurt and make the exchange to get her back, and he had no clue where she was. Its’ been kind of like that, where is my sister piece? And its' been maddening like that…fand for me…I wasn’t even aware part of me had been missing until now.
In my recent Hakomi self- study trip, I had a session where a ton of grief showed up. I did not comprehend or make sense of the feeling at the time, but it was intense. There have been many times in the work where my body automatically starts moving in the direction I’ve found myself in so many times, lmy neck resting toward the right, exposing my left throat with a limp jaw. In the last year, I’ve discovered that my intuitive self keeps leading me back there in order to journey back because I want to get the part of me that was lost during the accident…I want my 16 year old self back…I want the driver, the spontaneity…and there she is….. somewhere far off, in a place I don’t know in dialogue with death,
and omniscience. This dialogue has been going on for the last 14 years, being held, entranced, and captive. She's been receiving more and more wisdom from the realm beyond bodies.
If I use my imagination, it is almost as if in negotiation to come back into my physical form a part of me agreed to stay behind.…like my trade was that I would be able to be in connection with her through spiritual realms, gaining receptivity to spiritual matters, and natural secrets, but I would lose my ability to be here completely undivided with spontaneity.
I remember clearly what was happening when the Hakomi practitioner sat pulling me back to the present moment, and what she meant when she said,
“I’m not going to go there with you, I can only be with you if you are here”
I know where I was going, and I know where I’ve been tired of going, and where I still go because I’m ready to trade back the primordial potent visceral space alien and get myself back from that place. I have only just understood that now it is possible that instead of going there, it’s time to invite her to come back here.
Mind me if you see a teenager pop out, she's on her way back.
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daisy
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Goethe said something like..... we owe it to ourselves to be present (sic).